Category Archives: Ethics

Treason Tarted-Up

Crime, Ethics, Free Speech, GUNS, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Law, Morality, Paleolibertarianism

“Fatally flawed.” “A colossal failure of leadership.” “Deadly miscalculation.” “Flawed assumptions.” These are some of the euphemisms used by America’s governing traitors to finesse their crimes against the people they swore to protect. A gang going by the acronym ATF—the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—watches over and gives cover to Mexican gangsters and their local gun-runners, who later use this ATF immunity to gun down innocent Americans.

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed by weapons purchased under the umbrella of an ATF gun-running operation called “Operation Fast and Furious.” When good guys like Agents John Dodson and Lee Casa questioned the practice, they were ordered to “stand down,” or confine their activities to “surveillance.”

I oppose regulation of firearms; I advocate throwing the detritus of humanity—the gangs and the cartels of Latin America—out of this country.

A decadent society is one where the law prohibits local militia and farmers from firing on trespassers, but supervises the arming of the gangs that would kill these very farmers and other innocents. That’s a decadent society right there. This is who we are.

Another sign of a corrupt culture: Law that encourages enforcers to touch and fondle the sexual organs of its citizens, but forbids the same force to ask, inquire—verbally, using words that waft into the ether—if a suspicious-looking ruffian, loitering around a kiddie’s park, is in the country legally.

A society has atrophied when it cannot sharply distinguish non-noxious speech (asking a ruffian for ID) from a noxious assault (TSA terrorism).

Israeli Wants to Ape Americans

Ethics, Etiquette, Israel, Morality, Pop-Culture, Terrorism

I grew up in Israel and have never witnessed Israelis throng to Rabin Square (previously “Kings of Israel Square”) to celebrate the death of an enemy, although I’ve seen them a form human chain from Tel-Aviv to Haifa to stop a war.

Yet, such civility is bemoaned in a deeply stupid article on YNetNew.com. Why stupid? The author collapses the distinction between joy on the streets over Israel’s declaration of independence (November 29, 1947), or its winning of the European basketball championship with “public celebrations of battlefield victories.”

The same writer quotes The Book of Proverbs: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,” but asserts, without citation or scholarly substantiation, that this crystal-clear proverb “refers to domestic enemies.”

All in all, the idea of mounting an argument in favor of gloating over the death of an enemy—for bad taste—says it all about the Age of the idiot.

UPDATE II: Pleasure Me, Now!

Debt, Education, Ethics, Federal Reserve Bank, Morality, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

The following is from my new, WND column, “Pleasure Me, Now!”:

“Our society revolves around the pleasure principle. Unless something is pleasurable, it excites suspicion and is deemed unworthy of pursuit. This is one reason so many American youngsters entering the job market are dumb, difficult and will be, ultimately, dispensable. They’ve been taught, by parents and pedagogues — falsely — that learning and work must be jolly fun all the time. If your field of endeavor is no fun, quit it.

Anyone who has studied seriously, or worked to master a craft, knows that nothing worth learning or mastering is easy or enjoyable, at first — unless you’re a genius, a natural, or both. Most of us are not. For proof of the fact of mediocrity, look no further than the normal distribution, the Bell Curve.

With mastery, however, comes enjoyment. And mastery generally means hard work.

‘The value of hard work is overrated. Laziness is the mother of invention’: these were riffs offered up against my case by one of the bloggers at BarelyABlog.com. The writer, a physicist, makes my point for me: He happens to be a relative of Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics!

No, not everyone can ‘work smart.’ Whereas graft is within each person’s reach; genius is not.

The pleasure principle is at play in the realm of both personal and public finances. Saving for the future is not fun. It means postponing pleasure for the sake of solvency or other more ambitious future gains.

Tellingly, a survey by the ‘National Foundation for Credit Counseling’ has revealed that … ’26 percent of adults in the U.S. admit that they’re spending more than they did a year ago. And 40 percent of consumers are still battling unpaid credit card debt month to month.'” …

Read the complete column, “Pleasure Me, Now!”, on WND.COM.

UPDATE I (April 22): In the Comments section, Annette makes important points. Running my own tiny enterprise, as I do, I agree with her. When us oldies die-out, the American workforce is close to toast! However, home-schooled kids give me hope. I’m working with one such gentleman (a kid, really) whose work ethic, method of problem solving, and cognitive skills match mine. As my husband would put it, “A normal person.” But the “mature” “professionals” who came before him, all with fancy offices downtown, gave new meaning to the concept of outsourcing.

Let me parrot, once again, “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable”:

“The hybrid, hi-tech workforce ? comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent ? is manned, generally, by terribly smart older people with advanced engineering degrees. Yes, the people designing gadgets for our grandiose gimps are often Asians, many of whom are older. They beaver away under fewer, also terribly smart, older Americans. The hi-tech endeavor is thus all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.
My source in the industry tells me that the millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of flailing American productivity. I am told too that for every useless, self-important millennial, a respectful, bright, industrious (East) Asian, with a wicked work ethic, waits in the wings.
Let the lazy American youngster look down at his superiors, and live-off his delusions and his parents. His young Asian counterpart harbors a different sensibility and skill; he is hungrily learning from his higher-ups with a view to displacing artificially fattened geese like Meghan McCain.”

UPDATE II (April 23): Myron, Right you are. My source behind enemy lines—one of the biggest, most prestigious American corporations—is reduced to working in his garage, where he has better lab equipment, solving the company’s technical problems.

UPDATED: The Tyrant’s Intellectual (& Non-Egghead) Enablers

Celebrity, Critique, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Intellectualism, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist, Uncategorized

Much has been made of the American singers who sang for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Nothing has been said of the intelligentsia that has sung his praise. There is a big difference between singing for your supper and singing songs of praise for this, and other, odious characters. Paul A. Rahe at The Chronicle of Higher Education dissects “The Intellectual as Courtier.” (Here, with thanks to my Canadian friend, Dr. Grant Havers.)

“If, in The Washington Post, one were to describe the elder Qaddafi as ‘a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat,’ if one were to call him ‘flexible and pragmatic,’ if one were to go on to suggest that ‘Libya under Qaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally,’ one would be apt—and with good reason—to be compared with Leni Riefenstahl, as Benjamin Barber was by Ken Silverstein at Harper’s Magazine.

Worse criticism would justifiably be in store for the intellectual sycophant who chose to write on the eve of the Libyan uprising, as Barber did at The Huffington Post, that Qaddafi ‘is not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested and rules by means other than fear,’ especially if he were to add, ‘His son Seif, with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and two forthcoming books focused on liberalism in the developing world, has pioneered a gradualist approach to civil society in Libya, insisting along the way that he would accept no office that wasn’t subject to popular elections. No dynasty likely there.'”

READ ON.

[SNIP]

Because of their wide reach, Peggy Noonan (and her ilk)—while no intellectual— serves as a greater court courtesan than does the academic sycophant. As I chronicled in “LETHAL WEAPONS: NEOCON GROUPIES,” Noonan has gone as far as to conflate President Bush “with a Higher Power – Peggy believes God speaks through George W. Bush. From his furrows to his genitals, her high-flown linguistic banalities have lovingly depicted her man’s every inch. (See “He’s Got Two of ‘Em.”)

There are other culprits, of course.

UPDATE: Myron: You’re the funniest ever here on “nuance.” Why not cross-post this and other posts to the Facebook page, where the blog posts appear automatically? You’ll spice up the place in no time.